The Facts of Life

The grandparents have gone home and Daddy has gone back to work. The adventure of having three boys under four now begins. The door closes on my husband (after he gives me a look that says simultaneously ‘good luck’ and ‘this may be the last time I see you alive’). Oddly enough, though there are now more people in my house, I feel more lonely being by myself with my boys than before. Up to this point I had back up. If I couldn’t break free to kiss away some tears or deliver a sippy cup of milk to a parched toddler, there was always someone nearby who could do the job. Now it’s all up to me. From experience I know that when multiple babies are crying, someone has to be the second one (or now the third) to have his needs addressed. Luckily, the feeling of loneliness is fleeting. The kids remind me all too quickly that there is work to be done. Once I get back into the routine of feeding times and refereeing round after round of who gets to play with the new Spider-Man toy, there’s no time for self-pity.

The new kid in town is adjusting just fine to life on The Outside, miraculously sleeping through all the noise in the house like a champ. He is behaving like a normal baby, making his stay in the NICU a distant memory. The one thing we have to remind us of his early issues is his daily treatment of an asthma medication. We pop a little turtle mask on his face three times a day and hook him up to a nebulizer (which my husband and I flat out refuse to stop calling a deneuralizer). My other boys have pretty much accepted his existence. He’s only once been hit in the head with a flying object, but given how often things get thrown in this house that is nothing short of a miracle.

My next challenge will be ridding myself of extraneous bulges, not an easy task when sleep deprivation has me craving carbs like a heroin addict. And I currently have an obsession with Golden Oreos that may only be curable by death. My husband insists that I look just fine, but I’m not buying it. I’ve told him I feel like Daphne from Frasier. Niles was so enamored with her that he never noticed that she gained a hundred pounds. My husband wasn’t exactly thrilled about being compared with Niles Crane.

Sometimes I frankly miss being pregnant. When you’re pregnant, an extra thirty pounds is no big deal. You have that big, round belly announcing to world, “So what if I’m carrying extra weight. I’m creating LIFE here!” No one looks at a pregnant woman and says, “Maybe you should put down the cake, ma’am.” First of all, never try to take cake from a pregnant woman and second, the belly gives you permission to enjoy cake without frowning glances. In fact, people often encourage it. The minute the baby is born, however, you no longer enjoy guilt free eating. And if you don’t actually have the baby in your arms, you look like just another overweight American, too lazy to put down the Ring Dings and step on a treadmill. Carrying a few extra pounds wouldn’t be so terrible if I had enough expendable income to have a full, flattering wardrobe in every size I may need before losing the weight. Alas, being far too cheap to shop in multiple sizes, I’ve opted to wear only what I currently own. However, you can only make yoga apparel look fashionable so long before people begin to wonder if you actually know how to operate a zipper.

Frustratingly, I know that if I had the time to make it to the gym every day, I’d be back in my regular clothes in no time. Having little humans to care for, however, makes the job a bit more difficult. Right now, any extra energy I have goes toward merely trying to stay awake long enough to have a grown-up conversation with my husband. I remind myself that the only reason the likes of Heidi Klum and Jessica Alba get thin so quickly is because they have staff. As a mere mortal, I’ll have to wait until more free time materializes (or I win the lottery, whichever comes first). In the meantime, I’ll just have to settle for starting a 12-step program to rid myself of that Oreo habit.